Teachers as co-authors of student writing: How teachers’ initiating texts influence response and revision in an online space

Several recent studies examine social aspects of online peer review writing environments, but little of this work focuses on how resulting social interactions affect student writing over time. Seeking to trace explicit and covert dialogic influences across middle school writers’ work, we analyze classroom texts created online to show how teachers’ initiating texts and peer reviews become critical pieces of students’ classroom writing and response. Our analysis first grouped the texts by phase (i.e. teacher's initiating texts, first drafts, peer review feedback, revised drafts) to capture overall characteristics of these writing processes and products, then looked at each student's writing across time to understand how multiple artifacts and writing cycles informed the work. This analytical approach foregrounds the dialogic nature of online writing and shows how a class responds to assignments. The empirical micro-analysis complicates classroom writing and revision research by showcasing how teachers and peers become un-credited “co-authors” of students’ texts. Beyond theorizing that students take up such influences in their work, as existing work has done, we trace how these texts influence students’ writing and peer review, examining the roles of teachers and peers in writing processes and products.